World of Warcraft is highly profitable, and if we had to guess, the subscription-based MMO will stay that way for quite some time. However, not all is currently well in the wonderful world of Azeroth. Over the past three months, 700,000 players have decided to pack their bags and head to greener pastures, lowering the total number of paying players within this MMO now down to 7.7 million.
That still seems like a pretty substantial playerbase, and for the most part, it is. But when you start putting things into perspective, the outlook for WoW isn’t as positive. There were 8.2 million people still paying money for the game in March, and at the time, CEO Bobby Kotick did confirm that the company expected to see the number fall further throughout the year. However, we also heard in May that subscriber loss was going to be slowed through more frequent content, and that doesn’t seem to be happening quite yet. The confirmation of microtransactions might be just the extra bit of cash flow that the company is looking for, so we might have to wait closer to the end of the year to really see the WoW community pump some money back into the game.
When you can still claim that you own the most popular subscription-based MMO in the world, the need to panic might not be too great. World of Warcraft might have peaked at over 12 million in October 2010, but it’s unlikely that its owners will sit around and watch the community disappear without at least a bit of a fight.
